Delivering IT-as-a-Service with Cisco Prime Service Catalog and FlexPod at Steria

Steria is a leading provider of IT-enabled business services with 20,000 employees worldwide. Steria serves private and public sector organizations across the globe – with operations across 16 countries throughout Europe, India, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. With their expertise in IT and business outsourcing, Steria provides innovative solutions to help their clients improve efficiency and profitability.

One of Steria’s recent challenges was how to satisfy its clients’ desire to improve employee productivity and enable employees to work from any device. While IT-as-a-Service is becoming an increasingly competitive market in the Americas, offerings in Europe are still sparse – so this was also an opportunity to provide competitive differentiation for Steria’s services. Steria turned to Cisco to solve 3 key problems:

1. Providing employees with instant on-demand provisioning of desktop software and easy access to workplace IT resources,
2. Enabling employees to work from any device anywhere, and thus optimize computing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO),
3. And providing a simple, user-friendly portal and service catalog to make software offerings easily accessible.

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We’re proud to say that Cisco Prime Service Catalog fit the bill – enabling automation of desktop and mobility services and an intuitive user interface for their client’s employees in a new Steria solution called “Workplace on Command”. This ITaaS solution was deployed on the FlexPod platform for converged infrastructure technology (with Cisco UCS blades, Cisco Nexus switches, and NetApp storage), along with technology from Citrix for virtual desktops and Microsoft Office tools. And it complemented Steria’s existing cloud services deployment for “Infrastructure on Command” – an IaaS and PaaS solution, also using Cisco UCS blades and Cisco Nexus switches.

The results? The employees at Steria’s clients can select and automatically activate the services that they need from a selection of 20+ desktop and mobility applications, using any device in a BYOD model. Steria plans to add more services to expand Workplace on Command’s offerings in the coming year.

And with on-demand provisioning, these end users as well as Steria’s service delivery teams benefit from the automation, operational efficiencies, and time savings that Cisco Prime Service Catalog enables. In the words of Eric Fradet, Steria’s Industrialization Director: “Our position in the market has changed. We increased our revenue, gained market share, and improved our profitability because we proposed an innovative offer.”

Here’s more from the folks at Steria about their Prime Service Catalog deployment:

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